Congratulations to the city of Durango for having captured all three seats on the Board of County Commissioners! Going back 24 years, the Democrat county commissioners representing District 3 have yet to win a majority of the voters in that district that includes Bayfield, Ignacio and Vallecito.
In the last election, results showed that the current county commissioner for District 1 received 5,869 votes and his opponent got 5,155 votes within the precincts for that district. That’s a 714-vote margin for the current District 1 commissioner that lost the overall tally by 23 votes!
In May, a bill allowing counties of 70,000 population or less to elect commissioners strictly by districts was passed with bipartisan support in the Colorado Senate. The Democrat-controlled House killed it. House hearings on the bill included testimony by phone from Fort Lewis College. The only two La Plata County residents testifying against the measure were Jean Walters, of the La Plata County Democrats, and Durango’s mayor Sweetie Marbury.
According to 2017 population statistics, La Plata County had 55,589 residents and the city of Durango had 18,465 residents. In other words, a third of the county residents (those living in the city of Durango) elects 100 percent of the county commissioners.
Beginning in January, we’ll have three Democrat county commissioners, two of which couldn’t even win the majority of votes in the districts they were “elected” to represent. How is that representative government?
Dennis Pierce
Durango
